The Military Has Always Been Political
Editor's Note
Every regime remakes its army in its own image. The Founders understood this; Jefferson acted on it when he purged a Federalist officer corps loyal to the old order. The military has never been “apolitical” — it has always reflected the principles of the government it serves.
Chris Bray shows that what the Left calls “politicization” under Donald Trump is in fact restoration. The so-called “apolitical” military of our own time is saturated with the politics of the regime: diversity statements, gender commissars, and ideological training in place of discipline and honor. When Trump moves to bring the armed forces back under civilian and constitutional control, he is returning to precedent rather than breaking it.
As commander in chief, Donald Trump is making military policy like Thomas Jefferson — and for comparable reasons. Nevertheless, the Left’s narrative continues to frame the Trump administration’s military reforms as an unprecedented “politicization of the armed forces,” discarding history and using word games to misrepresent real political norms so they can be fake-violated.
Unsurprisingly, liberal columnist Max Boot offers the laziest example, published on October 15 in Foreign Affairs. Under the title, “The Dilemma of Duty Under Trump: What His Assault on the U.S. Military Means for America,” Boot warns of “the administration’s attempts to turn the armed forces into a MAGA militia.”
In this telling, Trump and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, are launching a “far-reaching assault … on the apolitical professionalism that has made the U.S. armed forces one of the most admired institutions in American society.” Note the rhetorical sleight of hand as he finishes that paragraph: “What Trump and Hegseth are doing also represents a threat to democracy — and a profound test for service members, who do not swear a personal loyalty oath to the president but swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States.’”
This is tactical conflation — blurring the distinction between the oath and the chain of command. If you swear an oath to the Constitution, that’s where your loyalty aligns; therefore, a commander in chief who expects you to comply with his policy initiatives is, supposedly, behaving inappropriately. You can already smell the dishonesty.
Boot begins with something real, drawn vaguely from Samuel Huntington’s landmark book The Soldier and the State, which presents the military officer as a disinterested professional manager of violence — but he misrepresents what that means. We do expect the military and its officers to remain outside of politics, but that means they are not permitted to engage in partisan activity — to participate in parties and elections. Soldiers can’t tell you who to vote for: “As the commander of CENTCOM, I urge every American to elect Kamala Harris to the presidency.” That kind of behavior is plainly out of bounds and always has been.
But the armed forces are an inherently political institution, and military leadership constitutes political action in many forms. Civil-military relations are necessarily political, and senior military officers are political actors. There is no moment in American political history at which this point is not entirely clear.
The historian Theodore Crackel tells this story in his important book Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809. As the first American president who wasn’t a Federalist, Jefferson exercised authority over armed forces led entirely by Federalist-appointed officers. He did so in the immediate aftermath of the political crisis implied by the Alien and Sedition Acts — a period of High Federalist coercion in which the Adams administration pursued the arrest and imprisonment of its critics.
Perceiving an army built by and loyal to Federalists as a political threat, the new president implemented a policy of aggressive military reform. Acting with the help of Congress, Jefferson embarked on a plan to reduce the army, allowing him to eliminate a third of its officers. Reflecting its purpose, a law that shrank the army on paper produced little reduction of the actual force. The consolidation of regiments retained the same number of privates and sergeants but required fewer officers, whose positions ceased to exist.
“The Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802 was not intended to reduce the army; rather, it provided the administration with a means to accomplish a political catharsis of the military establishment,” Crackel concludes.
Alongside the reduction in theory that wasn’t a reduction in practice (but removed a large group of Federalist officers), Jefferson reorganized the administration of the army. By the most remarkable coincidence, the men reassigned or dismissed from army headquarters happened to be the best-known, most ardent Federalists.
Reducing the ranks of old Federalist officers, Jefferson founded a new military academy at West Point, New York, which became a source of new army officers from more politically diverse backgrounds.
So Thomas Jefferson removed officers who were politically loyal to previous administrations and replaced them with officers who could be trusted to be loyal to the new president. As Crackel puts it, our third president “moved to mold an army that would threaten neither the new Republican regime, nor the republic itself. This he sought to do by Republicanizing the force — by introducing Republicans into the officer ranks at every opportunity; by winning over moderate Federalists — often by stratagems that would divide the opposition against itself; and ultimately by expanding the force and appointing new Republican officers at every level.”
People like Max Boot are telling you that nothing like this has ever happened before. They’re misleading you.
There are other examples. As a new president, Dwight Eisenhower pursued a “New Look” military strategy that emphasized nuclear deterrence and reduced funding for land-based deterrent forces. In response, he faced what historians have called a “colonels’ revolt,” led by army officers who sought to embarrass and discredit their commander in chief. Eisenhower pursued his chosen policy course over their objections, properly regarding himself as the final authority on national military policy. They weren’t being apolitical, and Eisenhower wasn’t politicizing the army.
The President of the United States commands the American armed forces and properly expects loyalty and obedience from his military subordinates. Donald Trump is not the first president to have this thought.
Erecting a false comparison between supposedly apolitical behavior among flag officers and the alleged politicization of the officer corps, Boot keeps fudging the factual picture. Trump, he writes, “fired General C. Q. Brown, the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” and “no reason was given.” But here’s his discussion of Brown’s military career: “Brown, a low-key but widely respected leader, was said to have incurred the administration’s wrath by making a video in 2020, during the George Floyd protests, talking about the discrimination he had faced during his rise through the ranks.”
You can watch that video here. It features an Air Force flag officer, in uniform, talking about “the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd,” and about “necessary conversations on racism, diversity, and inclusion.”
In Boot’s telling, generals who speak in uniform about George Floyd and race relations in American society are being vigorously apolitical, while disagreement or criticism of that same discussion is a politicization of the military. Officers who support the Biden administration’s DEI and transgender-inclusion policies are apolitical; officers who support the Trump administration’s turn from those policies are embracing politics and putting personal loyalty ahead of their oath. This is not an enormously subtle double standard: Loyalty to Biden isn’t political, but loyalty to Trump is. Democrats are politically neutral, but mean MAGA presidents have a tawdry partisan expectation that the military will follow their policy directives. This is not a depiction to be taken seriously.
All of Trump’s choices in military policy and personnel are fair game for political debate. But nothing he is doing with the armed forces falls outside American political norms. The attempt to pathologize ordinary course corrections in the military is a dishonest and self-interested effort to prevent reasonable institutional change — a new version of an old reaction. Like Jefferson and Eisenhower, Trump is bringing the armed forces into line with his chosen policy course. He is not the first, and he’s certainly not wrong.